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AND EVEN DUMBER: THE IMPERIAL DEFENSE BUDGET.
Stephen Walt has developed a list of "dumb" policy debates in the United States, the criteria for which run as follows:
But there is a special category of foreign policy where almost everyone agrees the existing policy is wrong-headed yet almost everyone also believes the policy is impossible to change.Walt lists farm subsidies (which are foreign policy by virtue of their negative impact of international trade agreements, the Cuba embargo, and the War on Drugs. As I'm optimistic that we'll finally see movement on Cuba policy during the Obama administration, I'd like to propose a replacement: imperial defense budgeting.
Absent supplementals, the United States currently runs a defense budget of just over half a trillion dollars, a number which does not include defense-related spending in other departments. By the kindest calculations, this means that the U.S. spends roughly four to six times as much on defense as our closest competitor. By less kind calculations, we spend about 10 times as much as any other country in the world, accounting for somewhere around 50 percent of aggregate world defense spending. Although the absolute numbers have changed since the early 1990s, the ratios have not. The U.S. has simply dominated world defense spending since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in spite of the fact that most of the other top defense spenders (France, U.K., Japan) are close U.S. allies.
If an analyst had proposed, during the Reagan administration, that the U.S. outspend the Soviet Union by a factor of 5-10, he or she would have been laughed out of government by Republicans and Democrats alike. Today, however, debate over the defense budget almost never results from the question "How much do we need to spend?", or even "Should we spend more or less?", but rather "How much more should we spend?" And this is simply insane, given the massive advantage that the United States enjoys over any potential competitor, and the security gains that the United States has accumulated since the end of the Cold War.
While there are advocates for higher defense spending, almost no one thinks that the U.S. defense budget approaches optimality; even hawks can find half a dozen or so expensive projects that need to be canceled. At the same time, few have hope that many of these programs will actually end, or that there will be substantial reduction in defense spending in the foreseeable future. Congress, the defense industry, and the military services are so tightly locked together as to preclude serious scrutiny of major programs, or of the budget as a whole. And so, as a result, we have a ridiculously oversized defense budget, with widely acknowledged misplaced priorities, that no one seriously believes can be changed.
--Robert Farley
COMMENTS (6)
And that's why it's up to progressives to keep raising these points to make the public aware of how much we waste on unnecessary military programs: money that could pay for universal healthcare, renewable energy and better transportation. It's amazing that defecit hawks never mention the Pentagon budget.
Posted by: Malcolm Kenton | March 18, 2009 10:50 AM
Isn't there another side to this - that every decade or so (if not more often) somebody in the White House will decide, "If we're paying for all this military capacity, it's a shame not to use it." And the next thing you know....
Posted by: Aaron | March 18, 2009 11:20 AM
I completely agree with this. Another thing that seems like a gross inefficiency is the divisionalization of the military. You have different procurement plans and competition for resources amongs the various armed services. There is aslo a larger total bureaucracy as well as a huge amount of straight up redundancy. Would it not be more streamlined to simply combine the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and create the United States Defense Forces?
Posted by: Shochu John | March 19, 2009 11:35 AM
Amen! The defense debate focuses on the tactics and capabilities required for a laundry list of threats, glossing over the larger ends and means of national security policy. The fault lies with the civilians who run the Pentagon and the White House. There is no debate about the national interests or the threats to those interests. Instead of asking what we need in the defense budget, policy-makers assume we need everything. After all, our greatest enemy is not Al Qaeda or China, but failed states, or even worse, uncertainty. (Shivers down my spine.) Hence, as the illogical goes, we need to serve as the world's policeman, and now armed with new counter-insurgency doctrine, the world's nation builder. It would be funny, if it weren't conventional wisdom. I wish all the fear mongering, especially about Afghanistan would stop. Compared to cold war, the U.S. faces no mortal threats from abroad that require a large defense budget in support of forces in Iraq or Afghanistan. I am all for being armed to the teeth, but regime change and nation-building are fool's errands. When will these economic times force us to into a more realistic and prudent military policy? If history is a guide, the answer is probably never. Please, more deterrence, less intervention.
Of course, saying these things out loud you might as well be, to paraphrase Woody Allen, one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag, screaming about socialism.
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